Tipsheet

Pelosi: This Supreme Court Has Gone 'Rogue,' or Something

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  June 27, 2024 2:25 PM

Democrats pretend to be staunch defenders or "our institutions" and "our democracy," but they're frauds.  They put their partisan and ideological interests above the good of the country and the well-being of our general civil health and governing system on a regular basis.  They prize power, and if that means burning pesky and uncooperative institutions to the ground, so be it.  One of the most transparent examples of this phenomenon is the Left's treatment of a Supreme Court majority that stands in the way of their "progress."  We've written about this a lot because their dangerous machinations require strong opposition.  Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, still a highly influential Democrat, went on national television the other day and undermined public faith in the federal judiciary.  When Donald Trump criticizes the travesty of a politicizes show trial in New York, including a judge who donated to Joe Biden, we're told that's a blow against "law and order" and an attack on our system.  We must accept outcomes, you see.  But when Chuck Schumer threatens Supreme Court justices by name, and Nancy Pelosi spews garbage like this, the Trump critic pearl-clutchers say nothing.  In fact, many of them nod along:


The says she lacks confidence in the Court, which she accuses of going "rogue," using that word again to attack the Chief Justice.  She's doing so in response to a handful of outcomes that she opposes.  Based on Democratic rhetoric, you'd think there's a deranged, wild-eyed right-wing Court stampeding across American jurisprudence.  But when the Court does things like unanimously issue a ruling that maintains access to the abortion pill (a standing issue), refuses to tackle a censorship issue championed by many conservatives, and upholds the ability of policy-makers to block access to firearms for accused domestic abusers, these same bleaters applaud those decisions.  The "rogue" Court goes un-rogue whenever it delivers outcomes preferred by the Left.  When the Left fails to get its way, however, they seamlessly toggle back to assailing an out-of-control, illegitimate Court.  They don't even try to be subtle about it.  And they certainly don't allow their on again, off again narrative to be influenced by, well, objective realities like this:


That was 2023.  Isgur expanded on this point in a recent Politico column: "Here are some patterns from the Supreme Court’s last term that might surprise you. About 50 percent of the court’s cases were decided unanimously. Only five of 57 cases — just 8 percent — were decided 6-3 with the six Republican appointees all on one side and the three Democratic appointees on the other. Ninety percent of the 57 cases were decided with at least one liberal justice in the majority. Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Barrett were all in the majority over 90 percent of the time, while Justices Jackson, Sotomayor, and Kagan were all more likely to be in the majority than either Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas. The three liberal justices voted together in fewer than a quarter of the non-unanimous cases, and the six conservatives voted together only 17 percent of the time."  And here's how the 2024 term is shaping up thus far:


A broader look, as of earlier this week:

The Supreme Court is set to issue its most polarizing rulings of the term after a streak of unconventional alliances among the justices — in addition to several reversals against one of the most conservative federal appellate courts in the nation. The justices so far have returned decisions in 47 cases out of the 65 they heard this term, meaning they have completed roughly 72% of the docket. Despite the political narrative of a sharply divided court driven by its conservative majority, only 13 cases have been decided by a 6-3 vote thus far, and an even fewer five cases have split neatly along ideological lines, according to a Washington Examiner analysis. The Supreme Court has ruled unanimously on 24 of the 47 decisions it has handed down thus far, though the most agreeable decisions are typically released first. But in a 6-3 ruling last week in Diaz v. United States, Jackson found herself aligned with the Republican-appointed justices who sided with prosecutors against a woman who claimed to be a “blind” drug mule, while Gorsuch joined with her fellow Democratic-appointed Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor in dissent.

In a different 6-3 decision surrounding the Armed Career Criminal Act, Gorsuch wrote a majority opinion with which Kagan and Sotomayor agreed, while Jackson chose to join Kavanaugh’s written dissent alongside Justice Samuel Alito. Another remarkable trend cropping up this term involves the 10 appeals that came from the most conservative federal appellate court in the nation, the Louisiana-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which have ultimately resulted in several reversals. Of the 17 active judges on the 5th Circuit, only five were appointed by Democratic presidents...Last month, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 — with four Republican-appointed justices joining all three Democratic-appointed jurists — to uphold the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau‘s funding mechanism. That case stemmed from a 5th Circuit ruling that scrutinized the CFPB’s direct funding from the Federal Reserve, marking the first of three major rebukes against that circuit court...The left-leaning Center for American Progress published a report on May 15 claiming the 5th Circuit was inviting the “right-wing extremists” on the Supreme Court to “take sweeping action to roll back decades of progress.” But the Supreme Court’s reversals at the 5th Circuit haven’t fulfilled that narrative.

The other two reversals mentioned in this analysis involved abortion and guns, fraught and controversial topics.  But such victories are either briefly celebrated or ignored altogether by the bad-faith critics of the Court, who resent a branch of government that doesn't reliably bend to their will.  These same critics are also behind the preposterous, ginned-up "ethics" panics that the left-wing ecosystem routinely churns out against conservative -- and only conservative justices.  It's all a pile of nonsense, but they whole echo chamber participates in these hit jobs.  Leftist activists funded by dark money billionaires dredge up phony scandals, which are fed to sympathetic "news" organizations, whose stories get picked up by other media sources, which then results in a lot of hot air from elected Democrats, reinforcing calls for "reforms" from the types of activists who planted the stories in the first place.  It's the circle of life on the Left, as they seek to delegitimize or destroy SCOTUS.  The tell that it's all political, having nothing to do with actual ethics, is the profile of the targets:

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Justice Alito’s entirely reasonable explanation for the [flag-related] events in question meant nothing in the face of reporters’ efforts to flood the zone with their own manufactured reality, which sought to portray a sitting Supreme Court justice as a quasi-fascist sympathizer who should recuse himself from ruling on important upcoming cases. As other media critics on the right have noted, this is part of a broader effort to delegitimize the Supreme Court and its conservative majority, particularly in the wake of the Dobbs decision...The only fecklessness revealed is that of journalists who like to masquerade as ethics wardens while pursuing partisan campaigns against their ideological opponents. It should surprise no one that the standard these reporters apply to Alito is both novel and astonishingly rigorous compared with anything that has come before. These reporters had nothing to say about justices recusing themselves when the justice in question was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who never recused herself when cases involving lawyers from her husband’s lucrative tax-law practice came before the Court, or after she made blatantly anti-Trump statements in public (for which she later apologized).

Similarly, when Justice Sotomayor declined to recuse herself from a case involving a company that had paid her seven figures, none of these people batted an eye -- because she's one of the "good" ones, who reaches the "correct" conclusions.  And did you hear about this Supreme Court disclosure scandal?  Of course you didn't:

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the target of an ethics complaint regarding her husband’s income. The conservative Center for Renewing America expressed the complaint in a letter to the Judicial Conference. The complaint alleges that Jackson did not report some of her husband’s income for more than a decade...The letter claims that Jackson “repeatedly failed to disclose that her husband received income from medical malpractice consulting fees.” “We know this by Justice Jackson’s own admission in her amended disclosure form for 2020, filed when she was nominated to the Supreme Court, that ‘some of my previously filed reports inadvertently omitted’ her husband’s income from ‘consulting on medical malpractice cases,’” it continues...The complaint also noted what it called violations regarding receiving gifts, noting Jackson’s “disturbing trend of not reporting material sources of income and gifts” has “shielded potential conflicts of interest from public scrutiny and undermined the ability of the public, outside watchdog groups, and parties to scrutinize her recusal decisions.”

I'm not arguing that KBJ broke ethics rules, or accepted impermissible gifts.  But we didn't see giant media firestorms over these questions, which are a "legitimate" as any number of the unserious controversies manufactured against the six right-leaning justices.  If it's a progressive, there is no problem, and no interest.  It's just so blatant.  Relatedly, this is a good point:


That's because the progressive block is good and right, whereas the (not often unified, see above) conservative block is bad and wrong.  Their thinking is as simplistic as that.  They are not to be taken seriously.  I'll leave you with the latest defense of a conservative justice in the crosshairs of this disingenuous crowd:

[Left-wing group 'Fix the Court] uses an inconsistent standard for what constitutes a “gift” to inflate Justice Thomas’s numbers. He traveled to Dallas in 2022 to speak at a civil-rights conference hosted in part by the American Enterprise Institute. Fix the Court counts the plane travel provided by Mr. Crow, an AEI trustee, as a gift valued at $68,333.  But the group doesn’t count Justice Breyer’s more than 230 trips for events—63 of them outside the U.S.—including the 17 trips the Pritzker family’s Architecture Foundation paid for Justice Breyer to take to London, Paris, Beijing and Copenhagen. Justice Kennedy and his wife traveled to Europemany summers for a month to teach seminars, but none of those trips are on the Fix the Court chart.

Breyer is a leftist, and his benefactors were leftists, so none of these people cared. Their double standards are so flagrant, they almost seem to take pride in them. Which is why a lot of voters just don't buy the Left's narratives at this point, even when there actually is some basis for their narratives. This, from the Washington Post, has to burn:


When you raze your credibility in pursuit of partisan objectives, people don't believe you anymore. And these people say the Court has the credibility problem.